A Review of Robert L. Park's Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness
to Fraud
By Eugene F. Mallove*

Historians of science may well
look back on this book as a dying ember from the funeral pyre of
late twentieth century establishment physics, which hurtles
toward a supposed "theory of everything," while being blissfully
ignorant of profound cracks in its very foundations. But author Robert
L. Park, a physics professor at the University of Maryland, is
now riding high. For some years he has been the darling of
editors seeking crisp commentary from the chief representative of
the American Physical Society (APS), a position he has held since 1982.

Whether railing against manned spaceflight, anti-ballistic
missile defense, alternative health care, ESP research, UFO
investigation, or his favorite whipping topic, cold fusion, you
will find Robert Park in top mud-slinging form on the Op Ed pages
of The New York Times
and The Washington Post,
among others. His politicized weekly "What's New" internet
science column is remarkable in that it is tolerated at all by
the APS. Especially since Park, with insufferable chutzpa, ends
each column with a fake disclaimer: "Opinions are the author's
and are not necessarily shared by the APS, but they should be." That's
pure Park, who hopes that his audience will come to see the world
through the filter of the scientific certainties that he and many
of his arrogant physics colleagues claim to possess.

Dr. Park has now compiled his wisdom in a short volume, in which
he claims to have discovered a new kind of science -- "voodoo
science" -- the title of his book. His definition of voodoo
science is encapsulated in the subtitle, "The Road from
Foolishness to Fraud." There is a progression from "honest error"
that evolves "from self-delusion to fraud," he says. Further
elaborating the definition: "The line between foolishness and
fraud is thin. Because it is not always easy to tell when that
line is crossed, I use the term voodoo science to cover them all:
pathological science, junk science, pseudoscience, and fraudulent
science."

This is how he says he discovered voodoo science. In the course
of his PR work for the APS he "kept bumping up against scientific
ideas and claims that are totally, indisputably, extravagantly
wrong." He is that certain, three adverbs worth, that many of the
things he calls voodoo science cannot be right. More often than not, he
draws his conclusions from fundamental theory that is supposedly
sacrosanct. Therein lies the fundamental failure of Park and so
many of his colleagues in the physics establishment. They have
abandoned what little curiosity about scientific experiments that
they may have had at the beginning of their scientific careers:
they attack data from experiments that at first glance appear to be in
conflict with theory, about which they have concluded one of two
things: 1) The theory can't possibly need fundamental
modification, which might allow the phenomenon to occur or 2) It
is inconceivable that existing theory can be applied to allow the
phenomenon. It takes a special kind of arrogance to conclude
affirmatively on both those points, particularly when both
experimental data and theory for an anomalous phenomenon trend
strongly against the doubters, cold fusion being a prime example.

Park thinks he knows what he and the physics establishment are
doing, but he does not. He writes, ". . .no matter how plausible
a theory seems to be, experiment gets the final word." For Park, theory
rules which experiments he will even look at. Revealing complete
ignorance of the bloody battles over paradigm shifts in science
(of the very kind he is obstructing!), Park claims, "When better
information is available, science textbooks are re-written with hardly
a backward glance." Baloney!

In Voodoo, Park dismisses cold fusion at its very first mention,
referring to it as "the discredited 'cold fusion' claim made
several years earlier by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann." He
says that a "dwindling band of believers" continue to gather each
year "at some swank international resort" in an attempt to
"resuscitate" cold fusion. He asks, "Why does this little band so
fervently believe in something the rest of the scientific
community rejected as fantasy years earlier?" He speculates
later, "Perhaps many scientists found in cold fusion relief from
boredom."

Park works himself up about cold fusion throughout the book and
tells us what he really thinks of cold fusion: "On June 6, 1989, just
seventy-five days after the Salt Lake City announcement, cold
fusion had clearly crossed the line from foolishness to fraud." He
states that Fleischmann and Pons "exaggerated or fabricated their
evidence." (He only speculates whether cold fusion researcher Dr. James
Patterson of Clean Energy Technologies, Inc. may have "crossed the line
from foolishness to fraud.") He complains that no helium-4 results were
forthcoming from Fleischmann and Pons by June 1989, ergo, cold fusion
is a fraud. Since at least 1991, Park has been informed by fellow
APS scientists, such as Dr. Scott Chubb, about helium-4 detection
in cathodes and in the gas streams of cold fusion experiments.
These independent experiments have been published in the U.S. and Japan
in peer-reviewed journals. There is no doubt that Park knows
this. Voodoo contains no mention of this data, an egregious fraud
by Park on journalists and the general public.

Park has not troubled himself to study the very data which he
demanded many years ago as proof of cold fusion, e.g. the
helium-4 nuclear ash data, even after this data made it into the
peer-reviewed literature. "You don't have to worry about the heat if
there is no helium," was his statement to me in the spring of 1991,
recorded in my book, Fire from Ice.
On June 14, 1989, in the Chronicle
of Higher Education, Park opined, "The most frustrating aspect
of this controversy is that it could have been settled weeks ago.
If fusion occurs at the level that the two scientists claim, then
helium, the end product of fusion, must be present in the used
palladium cathodes." Apart from his gross error of ignoring the
helium that might be in the cover gas coming from surface reactions
(such cold fusion helium had been detected in 1991 and later), it
is notable that Park has never mentioned any of the published
literature on helium in cold fusion experiments.

On the issue of cold fusion Park has traveled, in his lexicon,
from foolishness to fraud. Though he has not troubled himself with
inconvenient facts, such as experimental evidence of robust
character that supports cold fusion, he states preposterously:
"Ten years after the announcement of cold fusion, results are no more
persuasive than those in the first weeks." He rewrites cold
fusion history with ludicrous bloopers designed to entertain:
"How, I wondered, could Pons and Fleischmann have been working on
their cold fusion idea for five years, as they claimed, without
going to the library to find out what was already known about hydrogen
in metals?" Electrochemist Fellow of the Royal Society Martin
Fleischmann not knowing a lot about hydrogen in metals? A bit
much to suggest, even for an unethical obfuscator like Park. Park
is the one who should have gone to the library. He would have
discovered that leading cold fusion scientists like Fleischmann
and Bockris wrote the textbooks about hydrogen in metals.
Fleischmann's outstanding research in this area earned him a
Fellowship in the Royal Society, arguably the world's most prestigious
scientific society. In other contexts Park claims allegiance to
established theory and the expertise of leading authorities; in
this case, he does not even realize who the authorities are.

If Park doesn't get his information about cold fusion from
technical papers, the normal approach in science, from where does he
get it? Apparently he is briefed by fact-resistant critic Dr.
Douglas Morrison of CERN, who has attended the international cold
fusion conferences where he asks mostly obtuse questions, proving that
he, like Park, has not read the cold fusion literature. Morrison
has "kept an eye on cold fusion for the rest of us," as Park puts
it. The result of all this is to have Morrison, the prime
purveyor of the "pathological science" theory of cold fusion,
passing misinformation to Park, who then jazzes it up with snide
remarks suited to the Washington beltway crowd.

Morrison is the only skeptic to actually publish a paper that
attempts to come to grips with quantitative issues of cold fusion
calorimetry and electrochemistry. Every paragraph in his paper
included an elementary mistake. A few examples: he subtracted the
same factor twice. He claimed that Fleischmann and Pons used "a
complicated non-linear regression analysis" method -- which they
did not use. He recommended another method instead -- the one, in
fact, they did use. He confused power (watts) with energy
(joules). He claimed that hydrogen escaping from a 0.0044 mole
palladium hydride might produce 144 watts of power and 1.1
million joules of energy, whereas the textbooks say the maximum
power from this would be 0.005 watts, and a simple calculation
shows that the most energy it could produce is 650 joules. This is
the "expert" Park relies upon for news of cold fusion!

And Park well knows the propaganda value of turning a serious
subject into a joke. In his account of the early days of cold
fusion he observes, "Cold Fusion was becoming a joke. In Washington
that is usually fatal."

After assaulting the main body of cold fusion research, Park
singles out for attack Dr. Randell Mills of BlackLight Power Inc. (see Infinite Energy, Issue No. 17
pp. 21-35 and Issue No. 29, pp. 40-41). He says that Mills did not
offer "any experimental evidence" for his claims of excess energy
caused by catalytic hydrino formation. Park does not discuss the
multiple channels of experimental and astrophysical data that
Mills has cited to defend his theory. He covers up the serious,
positive results that the NASA Lewis Research Center published in
its official report on the Mills replication. But Park, at his
core, argues mainly from theory: "But those who bet on hydrinos
are betting against the most firmly established and successful
laws of physics." Mr. Certain asks rhetorically, "What are the odds
that Randall [sic] Mills is right? To within a very high degree
of accuracy, the odds are zero."

Though I expected Park to bash scientific anomalies, I was
unprepared to discover the depths of his ignorance about spaceflight
and its future. Commenting on his early 1990s testimony before
Congress in support of unmanned space missions, he recalls, "I
wanted to explain why the era of human space exploration had ended
twenty-five-years earlier and was unlikely ever to come back." No
future for human presence in space? Is Park for real? He ends his
myopic refrain with inept poetry bearing an absurd message,
"America's astronauts have been left stranded in low-earth orbit,
like passengers waiting beside an abandoned stretch of track for a
train that will never come, bypassed by the advance of science."

Amateur astronaut Park offers an amazing blooper, "If there was
gold in low earth orbit, it would not pay to get it."
Astonishing! He apparently does not understand such elementary
concepts as the small propulsion energy cost of de-orbiting with
rockets and aero-braking, when he makes this and other claims. In the
emerging era of commercial space transportation, this Park faux pas
will be remembered as a late twentieth century howler, on par with
statements by astronomer Simon Newcomb earlier in the century
that heavier than air flight was likely to remain impossible.

In Park's crusade against manned spaceflight, he even goes after
astronaut hero John Glenn: "Both Ham [a chimpanzee aboard an
early U.S. space flight] and Glenn would end up in Washington:
Glenn in the U.S. Senate, Ham in the national zoo. Ham died a
short time later without ever returning to space." He attacks
"messianic engineer," Robert Zubrin, who has put forth concrete,
well-researched proposals for cost-saving space missions, in his
book The Case for Mars. Park
says that Zubrin started "his own cult -- the Mars Society." Park
mocks the aspirations that led people like Dr. Robert Goddard and
so many others this century to work toward the manned exploration
of space: "Zubrin had learned his lessons well. The focus is on
the dream. His followers feel their feet crunching into the sands of
Mars, while the most daunting technical challenges are swept
aside with simplistic solutions."

On the book jacket Park singles out "magnet therapy" and cold
fusion as the epitome of "foolish and fraudulent scientific
claims." In the only "experiment" that he actually decides to
personally conduct to test any of his opinions, he launches a
misguided effort to disprove the alleged therapeutic
effectiveness of magnets in contact with the human body. He bought some
athletic magnets from a local store, then stuck one on a steel
file cabinet. He then inserted sheets of paper under the magnet,
finding that at ten sheets the magnet fell off. He exults,
"Credit cards and pregnant women are safe! The field of these
magnets would hardly extend through the skin, much less penetrate
muscles." Park had merely found the point at which static
friction (caused by the magnetic force) is insufficient to hold
the magnet against the force of gravity. On this basis he
concludes that magnetic field would not penetrate into skin! This
is completely wrong, as sophomore physics students at MIT, and
presumably at the University of Maryland, would know. Park gets
an F-grade on that one. "Not that it would make any difference if
it did penetrate," he says. Park always has some a priori theoretical
insight about why something "can't be." This PR agent for the
American Physical Society needs a refresher course in Science 101.

Given Park's incompetent assessment of cold fusion and his
failures in elementary scientific methodology, we cannot expect a
useful appraisal of other controversial areas, such as whether or not
there are loopholes in or extensions to classical thermodynamics,
whether low-level electromagnetic fields can affect biological systems,
the "memory of water" question, or the scientific foundations of
alternative medicine. Regardless of their individual merits, Park
gives these questions the same brush-off he applies to cold
fusion. It is not that one might never find areas of agreement with
Park. For example, some of the charlatan-like antics of Dennis
Lee of Better World Technologies, which Park chronicles, are
appalling and have nothing to do with the serious scientific
investigation of anomalous energy phenomena. And Park states that
"there is now overwhelming scientific evidence that we ourselves
can affect Earth's climate." Some scientists would agree with
that; I don't happen to. I side with those atmospheric scientists
who believe that computer models do not yet come close to an adequate
representation of all the factors that affect climate.

On the other side, Park is rather forgiving about such things as
government spending for tokamak hot fusion, which is widely
regarded as a financially wasteful research boondoggle even by
those who have nothing to do with cold fusion. He says absolutely
nothing about the ill-fated Superconducting Supercollider (SSC), which
was begun and then cancelled, before it could waste even more
taxpayer money. We do not hear of the scandalous recent cost
overrun at the ICF weapons simulation laser fusion device, which
was led by a physicist who was not even honest about his academic
credentials. To Park, this waste is apparently "all in the
family" -- the kind of money that the white collar welfare,
government-funded physics community can be forgiven for wasting.

It is tempting to speculate that Park may be suffering from a
psychological problem known as projection, or possibly cognitive
dissonance. At some level, this confused man with all his years
of schooling must realize that he is out of his element in
evaluating the cold fusion evidence. He doesn't really know whether the
evidence is good or not. Obviously he has not studied it except
superficially, yet he has gone far out on a limb in attacking it
-- he can't bring himself to turn back. Among other problems,
admitting he had been very wrong would call into question his
many other judgments, from manned space travel to magnet therapy.
He expected that cold fusion would have gone away years ago, but
it hasn't. So he creates the myth that the cold fusion field
consists of "followers who see what they expect to see." In
truth, it is Park who is seeing what he wants to see -- lack of
evidence where there is evidence! The following grand assessment
by Park of "voodoo" others pertains most properly to him: "While
it never pays to underestimate the human capacity for
self-deception, they must at some point begin to realize that
things are not behaving as they had supposed." It will be cosmic
justice for this profoundly foolish, mean-spirited flack for the
physics establishment when in the light of scientific advance the
bigotry and lies he has turned against others expose him for what
he is.